Katrina Survivors Need Homes, Jobs - Not Psychiatric Drugs

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In the aftermath of Katrina, FEMA and other government agencies have been widely criticized for refusing to bring relief and often for obstructing what relief people scrounged together and wished to contribute. In a recent article (Katrina: Why America Must Act) I have attempted to collect some of the information.

While the real relief is not coming or being obstructed, another kind of "relief" is however being sent in: Psychiatric councelling and drugs to "get over it". According to the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, Katrina survivors need Homes, Money, Jobs and Support - not psychiatric drugs. Project Assimilate is an initiative that does just that - bring hurricane survivors together with people who can offer help to integrate a family or more in their neck of the woods.

The US government - apparently enamored with psychiatry - forgot aid and instead seems to concentrate on "mental illness" and "law and order". Here's a comment by Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP):

After 9/11 various and sundry mental health professionals descended to ground zero and contacted survirors dispensing "grief counseling" and antidepressants as though they were jelly beans. Their services were not helpful - and all too often interfered with the natural recovery process.

The body of evidence showing the drugs' lack of efficacy and harmful side effects is overwhelming. The first phase of a $44 million government study comparing the new antipsychotics with the old was just released in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study, known as CATIE, confirmed that everything drug manufacturers and organized psychiatry have been telling the public and Congress about the new, expensive antipsychotic drugs is a lie.

The study found that the new antipsychotic drugs that are bankrupting health care budgets are no more effective than the old drugs. In fact, 74% of patients dropped out before 18 months. And worse, these drugs' adverse metabolic effects are even more profoundly harmful than the old drugs.

(Ref: Study finds no best schizophrenia drug)

Here the statement by The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights.org)

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Katrina Victims Need Homes, Money, Jobs and Support -- Not Psychiatric Drugs

September 19, 2005

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights) urges those helping victims of Hurricane Katrina to provide what they really need: Homes, Money, Jobs and Support and not psychiatric drugs. Psychiatric drugs, contrary to pharmaceutical company marketing, are not as effective and far more dangerous than people have been led to believe.

Jim Gottstein, President of PsychRights said, "We know that psychiatric drugs have been a major contributor to the six-fold increase in the disability rate for mental illness. Let's not worsen the suffering by unnecessarily adding to the rolls of disabled people diagnosed with chronic mental illness."

The data shows that when neuroleptics, the drugs typically prescribed to people with serious mental illness, are given this drops the recovery rate from around 2/3rds to around 1/3rd, at best. Somewhere near 10% of people given anti-depressants have psychotic reactions, which is then often misdiagnosed as a biological mental illness and people put on the neuroleptics that turn them into being diagnosed as chronically mentally ill patients. The same sort of thing happens with the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, such as Valium, Zanax and Restoril given to calm people down and help them sleep -- especially in longer term use. The same is true of the stimulants, such as Ritalin, given to people diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). "All of these drugs can be
extremely hard to get off of," Mr. Gottstein noted, "even if they don't cause psychotic episodes."

People should be informed of the true, limited nature of the possible benefits of these drugs and informed of their very substantial risks. "Let's not compound the Katrina tragedy by lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies at the expense of people's long-term mental health. These people need homes, money, jobs and support, not drugs," reiterated Mr. Gottstein. "There is nothing better for people's mental health than a caring community where people's needs are taken care of."

The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights is a public interest law firm devoted to the defense of people facing the horrors of unwarranted forced psychiatric drugging and other forced psychiatric interventions. PsychRights is further dedicated to exposing the truth about psychiatric interventions and the courts being misled into ordering people subjected to these brain and body damaging drugs against their will. Extensive information about this is available on the PsychRights web site.

James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq.

Law Project for Psychiatric Rights
406 G Street, Suite 206
Anchorage, Alaska 99501
Phone: (907) 274-7686) Fax: (907) 274-9493
jim@psychrights.org
http://psychrights.org/

See also:

HELP VICTIMS OF KATRINA
You can donate directly to local charities to give immediate help to those most in need...

Food Not Bombs Needs Help Feeding the Survivors of Rita and Katrina

People of the Dome

by Mitchel Cohen Brooklyn Greens / Green Party of NY -
mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

"I'm sick to death of hearing things from uptight narrow-minded pig-headed politicians. All I want is the truth. Just give me some truth."
- John Lennon

AS HURRICANE KATRINA RAVAGED THE GULF STATES, many organizations kicked into high gear to send relief to local groups in Mississippi and Louisiana, with no help from the government or formal relief agencies. Among them was the Malcolm X Grassroots movement, with whom the Brooklyn Greens shares an office on Atlantic Avenue. Tons of donated supplies poured into the office and were trucked to Jackson Mississippi, where they were distributed through community-based efforts.

I spoke daily with Les Evenchick, a Green who lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I was also in touch with New Orleans residents Malik Rahim and Mike Howell; the areas in which they live were dry and they were holding out as long as they could. The story they tell is shocking: U.S. and local government officials refused to allow water or food relief into New Orleans. They also turned off the drinking water. Hundreds of people died unnecessarily as a result.

And yet, there was no shortage of water or food being sent -- it was just not allowed into the City! When Green Party activists tried to donate water for the people in the Superdome a few days after the levees broke, armed soldiers pointed rifles at them and prevented them from delivering supplies. Even three Wal-Mart trucks loaded with drinking water were denied entry and turned away. No water was allowed into New Orleans. Evenchick says that "this was a brazen attempt to starve people out."

Attempts to starve civilians into leaving an area is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Who gave the order to block water and food from entering New Orleans? Who ordered the drinking water inside the city to be turned off? No one has yet answered those questions.

On Thursday of that first week, volunteers whose makeshift boats had rescued over 1,000 people were ordered to stop, under the pretext that it was too dangerous. The volunteers wanted to continue rescue operations. They said there was little risk, that desperate people had been welcoming them with open arms. The military "convinced" the volunteer rescuers at gunpoint to "cease and desist." They did the same to a state senator who had led a flotilla of hundreds of boats and rafts all the way from Mississippi to rescue people.
Who gave the order to block the volunteer rescue teams in New Orleans? No one has yet answered that question.

Officials claimed that people were trying to shoot down the rescue helicopters. In actuality, a couple of people shot into the air to signal helicopters to pick them up. Yet officials repeated this lie over and over, as justification for shutting down voluntary rescue operations and sending in thousands of fully armed military troops, along with private Blackwater mercenaries fresh from Iraq under orders to "shoot to kill."

Two U.S. military helicopter pilots plucked 110 people from the roofs of their flooded houses. We saw them on T.V. and cheered. When they returned to base they were called into the commander's office. They thought they were going to be given medals. Instead, as reported in the NY Times, their commanding officers reprimanded them and removed them from helicopter duty for "violating orders." Who gave the order not to rescue people?
For more than two weeks, hundreds of volunteer doctors and fire personnel -- including a squad from New York City -- were denied entry to New Orleans. They were dispatched, instead, to provide backdrop for Bush's photo-ops in other areas. The medical personnel were kept twiddling their thumbs, as people were dying.

A commanding officer of a police squad complained that his 120 cops were provided with only 70 small bottles of water. Hospitals were supplied with nothing. Could FEMA and local officials have forgotten to store bottles of drinking water in the Superdome, Convention Center and hospitals?

The only FEMA official on the scene in the early stages, Marty Bahamonde, has testified to Congress that he begged FEMA director Michael Brown for water, food, toilet paper and oxygen, saying that "many will die within hours." Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, responded that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinn